In a few days it will be 2010 and I still haven’t decided what to call the decade that is ending.   Ten years ago we were waiting for the new millennium, wondering if computer systems around the world would crash, and as we left the nineties we had more on our minds than what to call the new decade.   It’s ten years later, and from what I can tell we still have no consensus.   Is it to be the aughts, the zeros, the ohs?    The easiest solution, of course, would be to look back 100 years and see what the first decade of the twentieth century was called.   And suddenly I learned why so many referred to the early 1900’s as “the turn of the century.”   I don’t think that they ever figured it out either.   So will this also be “the turn of the century” with the early 1900’s becoming “the turn of the last century” or will this be “the turn of the millennium.”   Only time will tell.

It’s two days before Christmas.  This morning I started thinking of all the people who make my life easier and have started to address cards with gifts for them: the bus driver who gets me safely to New York City every day, the dispatcher at Port Authority who keeps track of the buses and usually just gets complaints about how buses are late; the cleaning woman at the client I am currently working at who comes in after hours and is likely the one who found my iPod and left it on my table.   For years I worked in customer service and complaints were far more frequent than gratitude.   (No one calls a computer help desk to say that there computer is up and running and thanks you for maintaining the network all year.)   So it’s time to thank all the behind the scenes folks and leave some dollars for the bell ringers, too.